Classic Selena - VVS Lemonade

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

I was a fourteen year old boy in a village in Italy when I lost my virginity

I was born in Japan but I grew up in Minneapolis. I never tell people that OMG LOL

I got a clown grant and I used it to buy a house in Philadelphia. Before that I squatted in an office that is now a gallery and showered at Crunch Fitness. The clown grant had no strings attached.

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

I would literally suck dick for fame if I moved to LA. You have to

I want it to become a lifestyle brand. You know, like Billionaire Boys Club or something

You're getting ripped off?! And you're okay with that?

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

It's all fucked up, all dirty money, there is no clean money.

Don't worry, I'll keep it a secret

It stinks in here, but you know some people... some people like the smell

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

Oh my gosh you're so young, you're a baby!

Oh her... I don't like her... She's just so...

Can you get me a show? Like I want to show! I mean I would love to, you know!

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

We were both 13, I think I was just really sexual at a young age, I ate her pussy, she ate mine

This is my first vacation in three years. I never take them.

It's good right? Not too speed-y, hits just about right

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

On the train to Rabat, I sit across from a man named O. I say Salaam Alaykum, then that I don't speak Arabic, but his English is good. He's from Niger, I ask him about what is not a war but could be a war, right now it's something else and he says "we will see" but doesn't seem too bothered - life will go on. He tells me has a family - a wife and 4 kids - and he's working hard right now because he wants a second wife. He says "that's the reality there. Everywhere there is a different reality, and you adjust to it".

This morning I watched a vlog of a gallery opening that happened last night. The show was called War and I read the "press release" and had a real adverse reaction to it because white people and bad writing and general idiocy, but you're not supposed to critique the project space ran by white liberal arts school kids from the lens of Empire or geopolitics or race or anything like that, really you're not supposed to critique it at all. The vlog wasn't good but it's interesting as a means of writing that is so obtrusive compared to text, where you have your night and there's no obtrusive device letting people know what is happening is being prostheticized. I saw T, who clearly didn't want to be on camera, later giving a forced critique of the internet film event, and I saw J in his Napoli hat and Heidegger shirt smoking a cigarette and not saying words. I also saw Yo Chill, but the vlogger didn't know who he was, the camera and the action does nothing to call attention to him because he's not deemed as an "important person" even though he's created one of the most important internet film archives of the last 10 years. I remind myself to text J2 about this later because he's one of the few who gets it (insert Yo Chill footnote). It reminds me of when C appeared next to a well-known art critic in a photo from a diary in an Art Magazine but despite his internet clout, he isn't mentioned by name in the caption because the diarist probably has no idea who he is.

"Paul didn't write to create a body of work, but to keep in contact with the churches he founded."

Last night I was texting T about the Carrere and the blend of writing styles (autobiography, history, essays) that it presents - he says we need a list of books similar in form, and I wonder how many similar books exist. I see that Carrere sold hundreds of thousands of copies of the book according to The Guardian and think about the French reality of being a writer vs. the American reality of being a writer, like the British reality of being a musician vs. the American reality of being a musician. I texted T about my problem of reading to write, of wanting to read so much in order to have it impact what I write next, the problem of this when I constantly put hundreds of pages of words in between myself and the words I need to write, the attempt I need to make, and where this need stems from. Essay comes from "to attempt", it's an etymology that has been broken down many times. T notices that there are more blogs added to the top, we start talking about email correspondence as a form, the Romanticism that accompanies it, Diderot's letters to Sophie Volland, and now I'm reminded of love letters and prayers and the importance of them.

"You can’t say that the Romans invented globalization, because it already existed under Alexander’s empire, but they brought it to a point of perfection that lasted for five centuries. It’s like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, shopping malls, and Apple Stores today: wherever you go, you find the same thing. Of course, there are grouches who deplore this cultural and political imperialism, but all in all most people are happy to live in a pacified world where you can move around freely, where you’re never out of your element, where wars are fought by professional soldiers on the distant borders of the Empire and have no more repercussions on people’s lives than the festivities and celebrations that mark their victories."

"Everywhere there is a different reality, and you adjust to it" - how does this adjustment happen, and what should it be? The train is very hot, the air conditioning is broken, and it's 110 degrees outside which doesn't translate directly to inside but I am sweating and waving two cards from Galerie Chantal Crousel - one with a list of names, another with a photograph of a dead elk - to cool myself. There are many people yelling and arguing, I don't know about what. A baby cries, it's all just rendered into a soundscape that I'm not recording. I wonder if my scribe app understands Arabic, but it's too late to pull it out. I wonder if there would've been air conditioning on an earlier train, but I wouldn't have met O on an earlier train. He asks me where I'm from and I say India. He says that's good, there are many Indians in Niamey and they're good people, they work hard, they contribute to the country. He works in agricultural engineering but he also has business ventures. He was in Fez for a religious piligrimmage. It's the second time he's been. Everywhere there is a different reality and you adjust to it. People move about the train and the baby cries even louder - I notice it's wearing a Mickey Mouse onesie.

"When visiting another city he made a habit of going to the synagogue on the day of the Sabbath. He doesn't know anyone, but he's not fazed, because synagogues are the same everywhere. A simple room, almost empty."

There is a hotel room waiting for me in Rabat. It will be cool inside, it will be close to the sea. I will escape the heat and these piercing baby screams.

Tales of the Alhambra:

The Alhambra shouldn't be as it is now. It's been restored, from the Peninsular War and an earthquake, and for what end? It's been restored to serve as a Disneyland for Instagram pictures. It exists as another orientalist tourism location, for Europeans who want to see Islamic culture without having to step foot in an Islamic nation with its dirty Arabs. And it's this novelty, that it exists on a hillside in the south of Spain, that is it's draw. I think about Certified Copy again, and doubtlessly if this were to be rebuilt as an amusement park on another hillside in Spain and sold as authentic, people would go, and they'd take pictures.

They put a museum in the Alhambra. The works had to be carried up the hill.

While walking down the hill, I realize that xaviersobased uses the same flow in yh i knoo that A$AP Rocky uses in Ghetto Symphony. In the museum I thought about how biblical scenes that were painted repeatedly were like using the same beat. I thought about 50 Cent's Many Men and Xanman and Lil Dude's Many Men. I thought about how Veeze and Slimesito dropped songs that sampled the same Bone Thugs N Harmony song in the span of a month.

I text J pictures of the Alhambra and tell him about this. He says the pictures I took are good.

Last night I sent C a quote from Jon Jost's blog where he writes letters to his daughter that's been separated from him: "I checked into a cheap hotel near the train station, managed to see some friends, a bit of Roma, and moved along. I was somewhat taken aback how, like Lisbon, Roma – at least in the center and in Trastevere, where we lived – had become overwhelmed with tourists and had changed itself to serve them. Sad. When I left in 2002 I had thought to myself that it was too big to be destroyed, as Venice and Firenze had been, by mass tourism – but I was totally wrong. The Roma we had lived in no longer exists.”

I also sent him Youtube uploads of screen recordings of SlimeGoon9 IG lives from jail. The title of one, "slimegoon9 presses k2 smoker in prison for hanging pooped boxers on his rack", hits me like a madeleine when he replies and I remember smoking k2 in Lisbon with this Australian girl in 2017 and fixate on the memory while drinking my cafe con leche. In the Alhambra, there was a woman wearing a 2pacalypse Now shirt, and I thought about Ab-Soul's verse on Joe Budden's Cut From A Different Cloth, a song I left behind on a hard drive as I migrated computers while trying to assimilate away from rap into PNW whiteness when I was 15 or so ("we got a new 2pacalypse now / when? before the apocalypse / wow how does he come up with this / if ur behind ab then maybe you can stomach this / who can fuck with this / i know you got a dick but use ur head bruh / they sleeping on me like a colony of bed bugs / cut from a different cloth and no one knows my thread count"). I text S about this because he's an Ab-Soul head.

T texts me an IG post that's a series of Paul Pierce clips from his recent appearance on Cam'Ron's talk show. It's so good I have to run the whole episode. He's really The Truth. Yesterday I watched a Lance Stephenson highlight reel and thought about how no one else has any shit even close to that.

Hopoutblick drops a new video. A couple of weeks ago, the video for I Miss Zomb dropped. It's a YBC Dul song that Hopoutblick features on with Merepablo and 9sideree, I'd been listening to the leak repeatedly on soundcloud, well over a hundred times, the beat is incredible. The cover art on the soundcloud upload is now the YBC Dul tape that it's on, but imessage thumbnails preserved the original image, an IG live screenshot:

Presumably it's one of the rapper's IG stories, presumably Zomb is pictured, and 42 Dugg's Free Merey is overlayed. The thing about the comments section for "I Miss Zomb" is that everyone is talking about how crazy it is that HopOutBlick is dropping a video. Accounts saying: He should be in Mexico by now. He's on the run for murder. Check Philly Most Wanted. And I check Philly's Most Wanted and I see him, he's only 18, and he's wanted for a triple homicide that left a 14, 17, and 18 year old dead. In the following week, an interview drops, there are more comments about how he's crazy, and he doesn't speak on any of it in the interview, the mics are so bad and they're so far away from them that you can barely hear what's being said.

And now the latest song, Jump Out Boy with Mere Pablo and Hardy. A sample comes in, looping a voice singing "Mama I'm a Criminal" and I think of "So Many Names", a YBC Dul x Hopoutblick song that samples The Fairly Oddparents theme song as they trade bars referencing people they've killed, the first time I heard him, and about Torcher Party, where he raps about people him and the torchers have killed. In the new song, he raps “Me and my t’s on the run, they tryna book us all”. It's different than Tay-K, because Tay-K had been booked, he did The Race on house arrest. And Tay-K never allegedly killed anybody.

This is all happening in Philly. The same city where a shirtless white fan runs up on Quanny at the Wawa yelling "they told me presidents was smart how the fuck I'm getting stupid bands" at him fanning out before saying he should have another show even though he knows the last one got cancelled cuz someone threatened to shoot it up. The same city where Simone White teaches and presumably wrote about the ceaseless apocalpyse that never comes. The same city where Tovii's deconstructed the form and lost his face in a way that a street rapper never has. I'm reading the war poems, the inscriptions of death in the shadow of the Alhambra, from the shadow of History, thinking about Quanny's Arabic face tat, NR Boor talking about being Muslim in an interview, Tovii's use of arabic script in recent videos, and the idea that the western hemisphere is beyond "the West", a "meta-West", an idea that needs to be fleshed out further.

i fell asleep last night while watching inglorious basterds on my laptop in my bed, i woke up briefly and tubi had autoplayed the beginning of django and i missed the part where brad pitt carves a swastika into hans landa's forehead and says "i think this just might be my masterpiece". tarantino would hate it but tubi really is the ideal way to watch his movies, b movie pastiche into the b movie streaming service. throughout the film, brad pitt talks about killing nazis as an art form, and scalping the corpses as a way to spread word of their notoriety among the nazis. it's an interesting parallel as i continue to graft Art onto everything, because he also calls it a sport, and I've been continuing to think about sports - i read the Zidane's Melancholy piece that G sent me and have some overdue documentaries to watch, spent part of a walk listening to ot7 quanny dame lillard on repeat, shuffle put on lil durk bang bros which sent me down a rabbithole of emotions as i continued to loop it for the rest of the day and still into day, the only song playing as i drive around my past and memories i'd forgotten about emerge – hotboxing in a park one summer night before an old man living across the street yelled that he was going to shoot us if we didn't leave and we had to snap out of the haze as best we could and migrate our cars to anothr spot. the grocery store parking lot where so much nothing happened. the everywhere where so much nothing happened really. i popped a zyn while driving and the nic rush was so intense it felt like my first cigarette and then i got nauseous and had to get an energy drink to get back up.

in the morning, C called me, told me about the gallery party he went to where N performed with others, and running into E and M and others, and how he found out that they'd been reading his blog, and then this morning I read E's blog and she talked about that and about other things that happened. she had told me i should make a paywalled version where I use names but reading hers I can only deduce who a fraction of the people are and I'm sure there's some that I've never met so it really becomes a fun part of the game, especially to consider somebody who stumbles upon this somehow, or only knows a fraction of the people in my life, or how it'll age and the letters interchange because the numbering system is only specific to a certain temporality that continually shifts. C and I talked about a number of things like school and work and the midwest and how different people in the midwest are. when i moved to new york, I didn't really think people were unfriendly because I just viewed it as a curt way of operating and didn't have much other American cities I'd lived to compare it to, but Chicago was crazy, even in the southside people would ask P and I how we're doing as we're walking around, whereas there's only a couple of neighbors where I live rn that will do that with me, and I'm sure part of that is because I'm not white. The uber to the airport was about an hour long and the driver talked the whole time, I know so much about her life and her beliefs, her fear of flying and of being put in an old age home. C told me about visiting Columbus with K and how friendly people are, he went to a party and people will introduce you to other people, how it's less scene-y but there's still a "scene" and it really is quite different than new york.

in the evening I called T and talked to him for a couple of hours while going on an evening stroll. we talked about how I'd FT'd A earlier that day and how things seemed like they were changing in terms of our values & alignments, natural differences that had always been there, but that have been exacerbated in a way, because of the bag and the things A is doing to get the bag, and in turn how that changes what A is doing and who he is to an extent. I'm sure it'll even out over time but right now there's a dissonance in values that is hard to reconcile. A lot of it has to do with a certain type of whiteness and the privilege of ways of being that aren't accessible to me. But other parts are about how I don't prioritize the bag because of how the bag changes you, and T and I also talked about this and potential bags that I could get but am wary of because of how they might change me. T said something like "you gotta get the bag, but you can't let the bag get you". at a kayemes opening, i was talking with R and they said something about how they were "designing a bag" in the literal sense, but I think about it in the abstract, and said that that would be my response when people ask me what I do: "I'm designing a bag". I made a burner twitter account that I need to delete with the bio "Daseining a bag" a couple months ago but haven't really tweeted on it. I need to make a new alt to post more freely on soon. I need to text E, and I need to text others, and I need to start the finnegans wake group gc

I woke up late this morning and i remembered a dream and it's been a while since i've remembered a dream and what's crazier is that E was in my dream, she was telling me about how she and M were making more secret blogs but to post images and that I should get on them too, and it's even crazier because this morning she added images to her blog which isn't exactly what she told me in the dream, but there's still this weird latent connection and it's probably because C talked to me about seeing her and M at that party and talking about blogs, but still. I'll talk to her about it when I see her later this week but I'm sure she'll read about it first. I was only "late" waking up because I had a dentist appointment. It went solid, the gum recession on my front tooth isn't that bad, and I didn't have any cavities or any other problems which is remarkable because I have horrible dental hygeine and rarely floss and only brush at night about half of the time. The issue relates back to the lack of priority I put towards taking care of myself while driving myself towards other things. I was worried about the gum recession for a while because there was a period in march when my dog died and I was really sick and didn't leave my place for 4 days and didn't brush my teeth in that stretch either and then when I did the recession seemed much worse but in any case it's mostly fine now. My dentist asked me if i smoked and I lied to her because she's indian and knows my mom and also because I'm pretty sure telling medical people that you smoke goes back to your health insurance and they'll charge you higher premiums, or at least that's some shit my middle school health teacher told us, and it's incredible to think that American public middle school means you take a class called "Health", but in any case I'm sure she can tell I smoke because she looks at a lot of teeth and gums and can tell what smokers gums and teeth look like. After the dentist, I got starbucks from the drive thru right next to the dentistry – a chocolate cream cold brew and a feta egg white wrap. I thought about Yungster Jack's Pumpkin Spice Latte Type Queen and PNW anthropology while sitting in the drive thru, and about how later I'd write about it and how the menu only featured the sugar-y drinks while the espresso and lattes and cappuccinos were nowhere to be seen, but that the cold brew was fine, regular cold brew w/ a layer of chocolate cream on top. I drove east and sat at the cape horn lookout, as I've done hundreds of times before, to feel small in something bigger than me. the gorge swallows you up. you look down over the edge while the wind blows and feel so precarious, you're so close to plunging down thousands of feet, just falling and falling and falling

Enveloped — it's a good place to begin again. I could have started with inundated but there is no paper there, there are no seams, no chemical glue to lick, no factory to produce inundation. It's an emptier image, perhaps there is more tumult in inundation, to be enveloped is a relatively clean process, surgical even, though envelopes can break, paper can stretch thin, and give way. Can pixels? Blanchot (via Lydia Davis) wrote of Mallarme questioning "What is literature?", how this question became literature, I watched Yuk Hui talk about War and Machines and thought about how I needed to reread Recursivity and Contingency and how there is always this infinitely growing list of things to read, to watch, to hear, it is impossible to accumulate it all into the self. This list can be inundating, but it never envelopes.

I was enveloped, I remain enveloped, but the paper is stretching thin — what will come out? Things will be different. I run around in so many different directions at once and I'm trying to simplify the routes. I make all of these Works, they accumulate from within and spill out. I understand when people don't have anything left to spill now, they're exhausted. I was exhausted.

The envelope gets filled, it gets sealed, and then it's shipped. Then someone receives it, they tear it open, sometimes at the seal, sometimes in it's entirety. The envelope can break in such a way that it can never be filled again. But it's easy to make new envelopes. And its this cycle between the postcard, with its public address, its inability to hide, and the envelope, which refuses to bear its words to the public, which has a layer of consent wrapped into the address, that one not break a seal that isn't meant for them.

This doesn't happen all the time. When I worked at the mail center I opened envelopes meant for James Franco and Meryl Streep. They no longer had boxes there, there was no way for the letters to reach their address. But it was always so boring. Louise Bourgeois's son had a mailbox but I never opened his mail. I could see that he was doing projects in Mali and I google him now and there's an obituary, he had a property in Djenne, where there's this incredible mosque I want to see, and I wonder when he last went, because the region has been controlled by Islamic militants for some time. The obituary says he wrote for Artforum in his 20s, and he was of that ilk. Things change so much, today S texted me about how there aren't really websites anymore, I replied with a Colby O'Donis track from the album S2 told me he was listening to, saying that there aren't really pop songs anymore. On my walk I thought about creating a website for Classic Selena.

On my walk I listened to Phreshboyswag - shinin like the sun on repeat. This wasn't today, this was the other day. I thought about how he idealizes an era of the Pacific Northwest I lived through via images and I idealize an era of London he's lived through via images. I sent the track to M - see me in my skinny jeans serving cunt. I play snow angel and think about how phreshboy's voice has changed. Ballin so hard could've played for Barcelona.

we played a game today in J and M's backyard tonight, where you say the name of an artist/band, but the opposite of each word, and then everyone tries to guess what it is. there were the easy ones ("desert" / "oasis), ones that strained under the weight of words without pure opposites ("limp bizkit" / "stiff omelette"), and ones that used culture to weigh opposites ("magneto not cringe" / "xaviersobased"). it was a fun thing to do, no winners or losers, just a parlor game to pass the time between beer and cigarettes.

I've been thinking about how I've worked in the past compared to how I work now, revisiting Herbert's Tell Them I Said No, and how one has to "grind to disappear" (L had an IG story about this recently). But that isn't really true. I could just disappear. From 2017-2020 I had an Instagram that I don't use anymore where the posts are now archived with a lot of photos and a lot of video work. It was work without an audience, existing because I wanted to put it somewhere to show. At my parent's house I have boxes of C-prints and black-and-white work that just sits there now. I was flipping through them in March, looking for a picture I took of my dog to frame once he died. The most notable things I found were an image of a public swimming pool that no longer exists, there's just a field in the park, the only traces in image and memory, and nudes of my first girlfriend who also no longer exists in a way because she isn't a girl anymore – for a minute I used the phrase ex-ex-girlfriend. I was talking about this with E and R recently and they made a joke about how that was when I got over her but that was it really, it was pretty funny, I was really drunk at KGB with S and opened my phone and switched to that account and the algorithm knew to put it first and it was like woah life changes and very little is permanent, and then my mind changed too. I think a lot of the photos I took at that time are good, and it's fine that nobody will see them.

When I think of The Name, I think about the Tamil tradition of Cankam poetry. To be a Cankam poet is to be part of the brotherhood of poets, something larger that oneself. In The Interior Landscape, Ramanujan writes: "The classical tradition of Tamil poetry is an impersonal tradition. The use of epithetical names that for these poets no signature was more authentic than their own metaphors". This is after he describes how the poets sign their works with names such as "The Poet of Red Earth and Pouring Rain" and "The Poet of Long White Moonlight". He goes on to say: "By a remarkable consensus, they all spoke this common language of symbols for some five or six generations. Each could make his own poem and by doing so allude to every other poem which had been, was being, or would be written in this symbolic language. Thus poem became relevant to poem, as if they were all written by a single hand. The spurious name Cankam [fraternity, community] for this poetry is justified not by history but by the poetic practice". As I type this I can hear Lil Uzi Vert from outside my window: "It do not matter"

There's an impossibility in attempting this practice on ones own, and this intertextuality does exist in film and music today, from shots referencing shots like the moon and the clouds in Atlantique mirroring the moon and the clouds in Twilight City and Gucci Mane and Chief Keef flows reappearing in different places every year, but it's not the same. It's the same sort of impossibility that exists in regards to how part of what makes the Gommateshwara statue in Shravanabelagola so incredible to me is its lack of an author. Likewise with the temples across Tamil Nadu. They were commissioned by rulers, but no one thinks of the rulers as artists. So it's a strange thing when I go to India and try to talk to ideas with my cousin, like asking about how I could get a carousel like the ones they have on the beach fabricated. I've been thinking of going back for a while again. The uncle who took my to that statue died suddenly a couple of months ago, I told that auntie I'd visit her next time I'm in India. I'm realizing that every person that I've stayed with in Mysuru has died within a year or two of my visit, without being particularly old. In 2017 I stayed with my mom's cousin and when I went again in 2019 she wasn't there anymore.

Z sent me a Jeff Wall text, "Some Comments on the Claims Made For and Against Painting", which focuses on the act of "world-disclosure" through different forms, as it relates to the "autonomous individual". We haven't talked about it yet, but I think I'd benefit from printing it out, and writing on top of it, rather than just highlighting it. I understood Z's sensibilities a bit better after reading it though, it stemmed from the Cozy Corner convo, where Z mentioned how an avant-garde is necessarily reacting against something, which Wall brings up in the piece, and then we got lost on the Surface as where the Art occurs, but that not all Paintings have Surfaces or something of that sort. It's possible none of us said anything like that, but I like that: The Surface is where Art occurs; not all paintings have Surfaces; all Paintings have Surfaces. Something to workshop for later. It'll be interesting going back to Paris and to the Louvre, for the first time in 5 years, in the sense of my recent interest in Historical Painting, but also in how painting used to bore me because of how I viewed the moving image as the most important form when I was younger, given how much information it could convey. Naturally, opinions change, it's a good thing that they do, and now I wonder if I'll make it to Würzburg to see Tiepolo's fresco on this trip. But some tendencies remain, as my mind drifts into the idea of a screening in that room, and how it would function in relation, and the idea of taking as many years as he spent working on that fresco to work on that piece. Markopoulos never saw The Temenos and they're still happening, slowly unfolding, with years in between the screenings that a select few pilgrimmage for. To see a film that no one has ever seen, screened in a very specific place. These ideas interest me more than white walls, as well as pictures to be put on White Pages.

On my walk home, I was explaining my concept for the waterboarding show that won't happen to N. Where it isn't just the sculpture of a fountain that waterboards a manequinn with the face of The Manhattan Art Review printed on it, but that it's accompanied by a 16mm film on loop in the same room, that the projection ideally beams through the water flowing from above, to scatter the light, and that the small room would have 4 surveillance cameras recording. There would be 4 viewings, each 6 hours in length, a week apart, and the documentation becomes the piece I'm more interested in, 24 hours of footage from 4 angles. "Art" as "social science", if one wants to call it that. But the show won't happen. T told me to turn it into a text-based piece (something more formal than this sort of a text) which I've thought about, but it's also a matter of... well what the point is exactly. Tell Them I Said No, echoing and echoing. Herbert describes Hammons as treating "the art world as a high-stakes game of strategy to be played from a highly critical distance". The "Art World" seems stupid though, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I could continue to barrel forward, it's easy enough to do, to knock down dominoes and/or connect train cars. The question I'm coming and returning to: "Why?"

Concept: I'm going to step away to wear Yohji and Kiko while going on a historic run on Jeopardy under my government name. Then I'll disappear again. 10 years after that I'll come back to "Art" under a different name. The world will be so different.

I don't really understand how the world works, G said, in between a bite of steak. R had been talking about how the mafia was buying up restaurants in Bilbao, turning them into secret chains, the corporate consolidation of our daily lives. She was an old woman now, about 70, and so much had changed. She grew up in a village without electricity in the Basque country, before leaving to work as an au pair in Paris, Rome, and London. When she returned, she started a bar with a friend. It was a feminist bar that had a strong connection to the movement at the time, where the most beautiful lesbians in all of Iberia would travel to, to organize of course. It went underwater, as did much of Bilbao, when the floods came, but after that R moved into a new world, that of fashion. She started her first boutique and her notoriety around the region grew once again. She occupied places in worlds. And then she grew old.

R worried about the declining birth rate in Europe. They want to replace the youth with machines, she said, and the idea of African immigrants becoming the new youth did not give her any more sleep. She had children of her own - her daughter was to take over the boutique, and she refused to give out hope for the future, for her grandchildren, because she believed the bad people ruining the world would be the first to die, their souls rotten. She spoke in this low hush, you had to lean in ever so close to hear her. They wanted to get rid of bullfighting, they found it cruel, but it was part of the culture, the heritage, so many words had come from it. G's uncle used to be a bullfighting critic, he'd write stories in the weekly paper, and G said it was as though reading another language, the piece so enveloped in its specific jargon. A torero of renown shops at R's boutique now and he's graced the cover of Vanity Fair Spain, but both institutions are propped up shells of what they once were.

The boutique is a wide and long room. Walk through it, past every tube LED beaming brightness below, and you reach the back, which opens up into a massive cavern of Chinese antiques. Porcelain plates, wooden horses, furniture of all kinds, find the staircase and then in the floor below are so many magazines and catalogs that have never been scanned. Purple Magazines from the 90s, with advertisements in them for galleries and publications. Names that are huge now - Luc Tuymans, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Felix Guattari, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rainald Goetz - but they hadn't been historicized yet, not when these things were printed, they were still becoming.

"The point is that this is gossip about formalized gossip that provoked a network of extended gossiping across time and space. Irit Rogoff has written that gossip is a form of testimony that is ‘invariably located in the present.’ It externalizes and makes ‘overt its relations to subjectivity, voyeuristic pleasure and the communicative circularity of story-telling’... Rogoff notes that gossip ‘is not fictional, but both as oral and written form, it embodies the fictional [and] impels plot’. Gossip, she says, bears ‘a multiple burden.’ Because it is ‘unauthored, untraceable and unfixed in historical time’, it can be read as a phantasmic projection of various desires by its audiences onto cultural narratives which it thus shapes..."

The dinner started, concluded, and continued, as did the viewing of several catalogs of early Yohji Yamamoto, mid-2000s Balenciaga, and Junya Watanabe. It was a goldmine of uncirculated images. But now his eyes burned with sleep as he returned back to the world of screens, longing to continue to turn pages in that cavern of pages until he had committed every photograph, every binding, every typeface into memory. He texted S an update, along with a picture of an advertisement for TZK Vol. 2 No. 7, which turned into a conversation about NFT's, cuckcore, the fellaverse, Amalia Ulman, Adam22, and Elon. It's hard to be interested in any of this, S replied, which was true in some ways, on the outside it appeared to be a schizophrenic tangle of associations, a map of chaosmosis, but in a concurrent convo, T was talking glizzy's, how they were "in" according to some, but how that it had already been written. T asked for permission to leak writing, but it was unneccessary, there was a way in which the words would find their way where they should belong, and if they wouldn't, then they wouldn't... It's a great place to start a rumor, in writing, because it takes the ephemeral and unfixed and gives it form.

See E's blog about Nate Freeman's farts and the behind-the-scenes of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". Or that J was in Zurich as the same time as D (whose name J2 uses to attend guest-listed events) who was there with his girlfriend X who went to college with Y who used to date Z who was in a sextape/art porno with ABC and it begins like Whitten's Greek Alphabet Paintings in Beacon, there was so much other gossip, much of it unsubstantiated, floating in the air, and this was how Herbert had to write about Stanley Brouwn. Because Brouwn fought an impossibility to prove an impossibility, every tiny sliver became so monumental, like Trisha Donnelly's voice, like Trisha Donnelly's face. A voweled artist was pregnant with a married man's child - that was last year and there's been no word of a child but she has a new boyfriend now. Not that it's anyone's business, but it's everyone's Business. There is so much work to be done. Bilbao had become a beautiful place, but it used to be rugged, industrial, disgusting. It needed a dream to become what it is now, a dream that enveloped everybody. And it was decided: they would build like the Basques, they would create a gossip factory.

First came the blogs, tumbling intrigue like dominoes as they spread via text and word of mouth, and then came the passwords, which loosely guarded some of the secrets. But this wasn't enough, new walls to the fortress had to be erected, the data being trafficked was so valuable in the eyes of gallerists, scenesters, and the oh so coveted youth who had yet to discover this underground, yet to be historicized thing, because there wasn't yet a thing to be discovered, but in time, in due time, Palmyra was not built in a day and its rubble still remains. A backend system was put into place, passwords that couldn't be hacked or guessed, but needed to be traded, leveraged, exchanged. They commodified their lives walking around with their pants around their ankles, and the emperor's new clothes were so desirable: there were all the most coveted archive pieces of course, but also what the newest Hararjuku girls had - VeniceW, fresh from the latest NewJeans video, Kiko Kostadinov, Enfantes Riches Deprimes – and it was smuggled in between bricks on a container ship. They moved everything as they pleased with their connections in Rotterdam, Baltimore, Cape Town, Singapore, dodging Customs, Border Patrol, and every other 3 lettered agency, not to mention Interpol. Baselitz said "Don't cover your modesty" and things could only balloon in proportion, like Kobayashi's stomach after swallowing glizzy's by the dozen.

They had plotted an end-point: a proprietary E-Reader, manufactured in Shenzhen but with laborers imported from across the globe. Isabelle Graw was smuggled down the Rhine from Basel, lured by promises of an antediluvian chamber that promised to reverse age. She didn't care about her beauty, but she wanted to escape the suck and fuck that had become Städelschule, every ad placement required more time on her knees as she wondered why she didn't contort the world in such a way that Jörg Immendorff invented "Oda Jaune" for her instead. Now she could change things, instead of writing toilet paper, she could write fortunes. Christopher Williams crawled into the container while it docked in Cologne, having agreed to do the product photography. And it continued, a container on a ship, migrating around the world haphazardly - a drunk skipper later and there they were in Miami. John Kelsey walked aboard, flush with a red noise and stuffed with satchels of... he had forgotten his baseball hat in the confusion and collapse, and it was as though he'd lost all purpose and sought to recompense this with chemical speed. It didn't matter, among the din of whispers in the container, attempting to segregate the circuits of secrets from prying ears, as he tried to talk to Isabelle about the Bernadette Corporation Supreme resale prices, but the bits kept getting stolen, recirculated, so much data bouncing around this storage container moving from ocean to ocean, still yet to reach Shenzhen.

And yet when it did, it did not leave the port. R was crucial in this step. She knew the Chinese were working with "the mafia" to buy up every business that existed, not just in Bilbao, but in Frankfurt, London, San Francisco, everywhere where there was a loophole in legislation, and that means everywhere where "democracy" claims to exist, because with democracy comes lawyers and with lawyers comes loopholes. And so she met with the Triads and in her hushed whisper negotiated her terms. The container got lost in the stacks, and with it so much gossip, which needs air to survive but was instead submersibled. The E-Reader was shipped to basements across the world, waiting to be discovered. Its e-ink had never been seen before, a screen devoid of color, yet able to re-present Jutta Koether and Cy Twombly in a new form of writing, through a new type of codec file. PDF's, EPUB's, DJVU's, none of them worked, this was something different.

The e-readers were distributed around the world. When they were touched, they would mechanically reproduce themselves, and when they fell on unfamiliar eyes they would translate themselves. Every gallerina, whether she/they worked in Hong Kong or Seoul, Hamburg or Shanghai, Harare or Santiago, lost themselves in the endless scroll of gossip, regardless of tongue. And they spread upwards and outwards, to the curators, programmers, and publicists, but also to the DJ's, club kids, drug addicts, and scenesters, you could plug it into a CDJ and make the most beautiful mix, you could rip that battery out and extract the most powerful speedball from its acid, you could smash the screen against your face and the shards would kiss your face, steal a little blood, then return to being one, waiting to grant the bliss of addiction to their next pair of eyes.

The Triads didn't trust R, they knew she was plotting something, her wizened gaze meeting their beady low Chinese eyes. You should be with Chris Tucker, she said. They were so high. 什麼?? mumbled back the Chinamen. Made a bitch. Get on her knees. Look at me. When she suckin. Eyes low. Like I'm Chinese, I should be with Chris Tucker. She whispered with the coldest authority, punctuating every syllable. Then she contined: That nigga don't want smoke, he second-hand puffin. I get a nigga whacked. Just one hand gesture.

In the haze of the Chinese smoke the world was changing. R knew she would die soon, but it didn't matter. She believed in the world, and she believed that death would come righteously. When we dined, she asked me if I was religious, and if my religion permitted drinking. In between bites of steak, I sipped a Rioja, because God willed it as such. In the smoke she finished, and she did not stutter: Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see conc—. Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see concrete.

“The only eyes that see are the eyes of water, eyes that are blinded by our tears of compassion for the other.” - Christopher Wise

the numbers are gone, I was texting T about it, he said heartbeats aren't numbered, they just beat, the heart is a rollie not a stopwatch, of course traces remain, chris marker, magic marker, no mr. clean magic eraser, just permanence, or the idea of pursuing it. something that's always bothered me permanence, even now i wonder when this beard will be gone, when this face will be gone, but also of inscribing permanence onto the body, tattoos, scars, Mali, the Sahel, Egypt on my mind: A SITUATION OF TOTAL PLACELESSNESS ("The face of the future has traces of our past." - Flusser)

everyday by chief keef; it's about how we're always writing, not always with words, if the book doesn't bleed it will be a failure, think of the scars and teardrop tattoos, it's not a textile, the body is writing, thought isn't coming from the body, thought is the body

days happened, nights passed, as did a full moon. i was close to tears watching salaam cinema. again, i thought of how the world was different but the same. there are kisses that could change everything. What am I doing here?

heartbeats

Marseille Art Shit Diary No. 3:

Shit really is the word for what I just waded through. A night of pure excrement. I didn't really do anything before heading to Oct0 for their opening. I had emailed S this week about meeting up, who I'd met last year at S2's opening in London. I knew it was at the end of a long night, he wouldn't really remember it. On my way to the opening I first stopped by an intermarche - grabbed a chicken sandwich and a juice - and then when I neared the gallery I passed a McDonald's and got sucked into its vortex - un petit beouf, a small coke, an oreo mcflurry, I only finished the sandwich. Later M would tell be about how there's a McDonald's here that revolted against corporate during the pandemic. They changed their name to "Apres M", changed the arrangement of the sign outside to signifiy that, and it was a sort of hub for mutual aid.

When I ran into S outside the Oct0 opening it was a little awkward - he was very German gay artworld nonartist, I texted J about it almost immediately, and I struggled to click as I was still far too sober for the interaction at that point. I drank some wine there and met C, an Irish writer and painter who'd been living in the region for a while. We talked about Joyce and Cixous and life and practices. It was the first conversation I've had here that I truly enjoyed and it turned into getting dinner at a Syrian restaurant and more white wine. I saw him briefly in the blur after that and I had a moment of regret of not making my time with C the entirety of the night, but he also encouraged me to do otherwise.

Part of being too forthcoming is me batting around the bush as to why I'm in Marseille at this time, which is partially coincidental and has to do with the independent research I'm doing yes, but also was so that I'd get a chance to meet with S at a time when things were "happening" here - S2 had told me he'd be a good person to link with on the end of turning art into a thing that potentially pays me money, something that after this night I'm not necessarily turned away from, but feel is truly far away, something that I've also accepted when I talk about Baudelaire's writing practice and how his addiction to it constantly drove him into financial troubles. After dinner with C, I ran into M and A and A2 on the street and then ended up going to a different restaurant in Court Julien with them. I got grape leaves and I had a glass of arak. It was fine, they asked what I'd been up to, the dynamic was more clearly established now, A was wearing the lungi and I texted my sister about it again, but it was fine. At the end they said they were looking for drugs for the party, I wasn't really at that time, but I kept it in mind because some of the French people I was with the previous night were talking about 3M or trois-eme, a research chemical that has effects that are somewhere between molly and coke.

I arrive at the Systema party with A and A2 and M and we hang out and talk and smoke cigarettes for a bit. People aren't really dancing at this point, just hanging around the courtyard, and I get more wine in my system. When I was talking to C and telling him about how it's hard for me to deal with people in these settings, his advice was more alcohol. I took it. I saw him briefly in the mix there, he cheers'd my glass, and then I didn't see him again. I did see S though, he was standing up on a ledge, lording over the space, and I started to chat with him again, much more fluidly this time. Before, when I ran into him at the gallery, he said something along the lines of "were there a lot of drugs involved that night", referring to the night I met him, and I made a relatively calculated decision to play the game on both ends. M and A and A2 were looking for drugs, maybe I could find some of this "trois eme" for them, but instead S offered me his coke and told me to take the baggie to the bathroom, cut a line, and then come back. I did as such and then returned and then we got to talking shit.

Cocaine activates people, it makes them talk, it makes them dance, I'm sure there's plenty of passages in Reena Spaulings or Chris Krauss or other art world literature about the function it provides. I returned to a long series of conversations from an old gay German man about his disillusionment with art, with social change, with the world. It was mildly overwhelming but I understood - the crux of the issue was that he thought his curation was "doing something" in these past decades. At Artists Space, at the ICA, around all that, at these parties. When I met him last year he was talking about producing a Hannah Black book and also a Dennis Cooper film and I found the two ends of those spectrums to be quite funny afterwards. It made sense. And now here he was, being quite honest with me, in an extremely harsh way.

The show that his gallery had just put on - he didn't believe in it. Little miniature houses, it's nice yes, but what does it do, he said, before then lamenting that 80% of the board at MOMA is MAGA, a thing to me that's just like "DUH", but he also used the phrase "The Obama Years" to describe his time in New York and then I understood completely that he lived in this sort of fantasy land that got shattered with the election of Trump. The Obama mask on Empire was enough for him to do curational work uplifting minority artists, things of that nature, so that he could feel good about the art industrial complex and his work within it. Now, that fantasy was wholly shattered and that's why he's in Marseille, a small city, running this space that still gets money from different places, and gets its artists some of that money, and has a semiotext(e) bookstore within it, full of books like "Hatred of Capitalism" and "The Coming Insurrection" - and I saw so many other familiar names: Reena, Kathy Acker, Etel Adnan, Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, the list goes on and you get the idea. C was talking to me about how important these books are, that these books are for sale here, because they don't really exist in France the way that they do it the Anglosphere.

C and I talked a lot of shit at the gallery and at dinner - about India, about Ireland, about their relation to the UK, about what France provides and how it is here. He commented on my jacket at first - the Kiko piece that has this lace quality to it and it stands out, that's why I wear it. It's as much part as getting into character as taking the baggie from S and going to the bathroom. That phrase "getting into character" is entrenched into my mind from Pulp Fiction. In that opening scene where Jules and Vincent go to shoot those guys and get the briefcase back, one of them says "let's get into character". I can't remember if it's before or after the conversation about the Royale with Cheese, but when I was at McDonald's I sent E a picture of this display that said "Le Big Mac" and had the Samuel L. Jackson pronunciation running through my head. Getting into character has a decent amount to do with code-switching, you assume certain characters to talk with certain people, modulate those versions to talk to other people, so on so forth, obvious enough, nothing ground-breaking there. At first C thought I was the artist, because I was brown yes, and the artist was Persian, but moreso how I was dressed, the Kiko jacket, the brown loafers, and that was fine, it got us talking. I sent pictures of the show to Z - the works were these little 3-D printed houses, rendered in this gray that sapped away outside associations, and they all had these tiny LED screens that took real advertisements from the streets of Tehran and reintroduced them into this context. My impression of the work was these beautiful little objects, 10 of them in total, were like poems. Sure there is little shift in the world besides those who see them and engage with them in a certain way, but they're meaningful enough for the artist to commit themsleves to making and now, as the signs of Tehran are shown in this context, I'm reminded of Flusser and Groundlessness and Universal Homelessness. It's fine work for me, but at the courtyard of the former palace that is now a music conservatory that hosts this non-commerical art fair that is hosting this party, S is really questioning the purpose of these works, what they are doing in the world, what he is doing by extension, and lamenting that there isn't "change" coming from this kind of work being shown in that kind of space.

When I first met A he talked to me about how his bag got stolen. It had his computer and his passport, a significant amount of his life in it. At the second dinner of last night, he told me about seeing S at the police station as well. Apparently S's car and his apartment had been broken into while he was away (he told me was vacationing in Greece) and maybe there's a small extent to which these recent events, which S didn't tell me about (and had no reason to do so), where echoing through his mind, amplifying his disillusionment, but it's probably much more realizing that his life, his "wikipedia page" as he put it, was doing nothing but serving Empire. I don't think he would characterize it as such, but it's easy to group what he did into neoliberalism, corporations going gay/woke, and so on, it's easy to throw these big words about and to let them do the work of holding the complexities of the world. S talked so much, he talked about S2's work, he talked about it relation to the market and collectors and other artists in New York and London, and he compared the places of different artists in these spheres to that of scenes of German artists in the 20th century. He talked about criticsm in the 80's, when it would actually attack artists and cause questions to arise, and then it really clicked in my mind as to why boomers like Walter Robinson love The Manhattan Art Review. I thought about talking about Staten Island with him. Earlier, he showed me a tiny pamphlet he had stuck in his iphone case that held a story about Staten Island, in both French and in English. But now wasn't the time, I was reacting, he was talking, it was nice, like I said I've been doing too much talking.

I suppose S went on and on, this is what cocaine does, and I'm unsure if there was any new ground being broke besides the same recirculation of lamentations. Recirculation brings up howth and environs and that opening page of Finnegans Wake and when I was talking to C, he was telling me about the necessity of reading the work in a Dublin accent. He told me about where he grew up in Dublin, the history of it, the prostitutes that used to run its streets, and when I called it a cultural backwater, he vehemently disagreed. It was a backwater yes, but there was culture. That was a far more interesting conversation, he fed me gossip about Irish writers, the schemes they cooked up to avoid taxes, problems with writers and their estates and their families after their deaths, and he told me about going to bars in the west of Ireland, tiny places far from tourists, where there is no music, at times it gets so quiet that one can hear the clock ticking. He told me that one of the best things a young writer could do would be to spend time getting drunk in Ireland and listening to the language within the walls of the pub. We exchanged Instagrams and he told me that he'd let me know if he saw of any residencies.

At a certain point, S takes a selfie with me and then sends it to S2. I'm smoking a cigarette in it, my hand partially obscuring my face, which is good. It's an interesting thing to do, on one end, it's a fun "hey we linked up" type of picture, similar to me posting Z2 on Twitter to all of those mutuals, but it's also a validation check, to make sure I'm not lying to climb in some world. We talked about how everything in Art is work, the social end, it never ends, and I brought up SF tech culture and young VC's on Twitter as an analogous situation but I'm not sure he understood what I was saying. We went to the bathroom to do another line and he told me that he'd keep it a secret, which to me meant that he'd talk about it to whoever knew me almost instantly. It didn't upset me, I thought it was funny, the idea of creating this sort of a secret that's so banal, that's constant in the art world. Going to the bathroom together to do drugs. There was a long line for the stalls while the urinals sat empty - because everyone else was doing it. That's how original it was.

At this point I decide my time of chatting with S has more or less come to a natural conclusion. I buy a glass of wine from the bar and I run into M there from last night. She DM'd me before the event, asking what time I was going and whe the different sets were but I didn't reply, too many things going on and she was too removed from them. We had a nice little chat and then she ended up elsewhere in that courtyard and I don't think she really wanted to talk to me because I dubbed her in a way. This was fine. In the morning I was thinking about her background. Separated parents (a French dad who lives and works in Silicon Valley and an American mom, I'm not sure where she is), grew up in Munich, attended an international school where she learned French and English and German, which she only ever spoke outside the home. Then Bard, then apres-Bard, then now, it's the obvious thing of coming from some degree of money to do those things and live in that way and in my mind there's too many gaps to overcome and there just wasn't enough chemistry during the previous night at the bar, maybe some of those assumptions fed into it for me. We were both in Marseille speaking English but our circumstances of being there were so different.

I dance with these French girls who speak English, one of them I met at an opening two nights prior, and we talk, they're going to New York next week and don't really know anyone there and one of them is friends with the gallerist who runs an attic space in Paris where J has shown so I realize the natural link, we exchange IG's and I tell them I can introduce them to him. I text him that too, and that I miss him and he sends me a picture of Z and N at the opening on Hancock Street and missing them and wishing I was there hits me. I bought a flight to India, I'll be there on Tuesday. It'll be good, to sit with everything there, but I want to get back to New York and see my friends sooner than later. I tweet some bullshit about Critical Melancholy and M2 replies. It's such a funny stand-in phrase for the feeling that early Yung Lean, Bladee, Black Kray produces. It's all white artists in that Buchholz show and now I'm thinking Kray's influence on Lean and Bladee and that affect, how there can't be a Critical Melancholy without roots in Blackness and Black Culture, but also how Kray could give a fuck about show happening on 82nd street, he's built his own world and system that lets him make art and his fans stream it, buy it, buy merch, he's done the thing of how to be a working artist in these times. S was talking about what Shayne Oliver does and how it reaches so much more stuff, yes it happens at the Shinkel Pavillion too, but clothes are worn out, nightlife is experienced, these things, in his mind, were greater than a painting in a gallery.

I'm in the bathroom again and one of the French girls offers me some of this exotic "trois eme". It's sharp, cutty on the nose, and I'm glad I only took a bump. I'm not sure that I felt anything in particular but it staves off the comedown off the coke and I'm back outside dancing and socializing as things are winding to a close and we're scheming for the next move. It doesn't end up being with them, but I end up in a back room of the palace with R and R2 and K, who all performed/DJ'd, people are doing lines off an iphone and drinking wine. At this point I'm ready to go home, there is more night to be lived yes, but my phone is dead and it's 45 minute walk back to my place that I don't want to embark on without it, so I'm stuck riding the rest of the night out. We get kicked out of the palace by the security guard and head to the apartment of this couple, M3 and T, who are in the group. It's only 8 or 9 of us. It's the best play for me, I know there'll be a phone charger at this apartment, but the trade off is that I'm stuck there until it's time to leave. It's fine, we drink, we talk, we gossip, there's more cocaine, the sun rises, and then it's time to go. The metro is running at this point and I take it back, feeling like a degenerate with the stimulants in my veins. I get back to my place and my airbnb hosts are starting their day as I walk in. So much nothing happened, especially for those last few hours, that's so much of "the art world", people hanging out and doing drugs and drinking until the sun rises. I understand why it happens but I think about how much nicer it would've been to have a night that extends past the sunrise with my friends. There will be plans to go out again tonight, but I feel spent. I've done enough. There's no more "Art Shit Diary" to be written, I've writhed around in the excrement of disillusionment, aspirations, chemicals, and desire for too long. I've been in the shit, I've been with the shits, and it really just is shit.

I'm looking for an ending of sorts, the night signaled an ending of sorts for me, in terms of certain possibilities that could have been, that I wasn't sure I wanted to begin with, and foreclosure is a sort of opening. The things that eat at S are realities that I've long accepted, getting a grant is no different than getting a check from Amazon in terms of where the money's coming from and whether it's "clean" or "dirty" - there is no clean money, only the illusion of clean money. Trench Town pops into my head: "Dirty money, pick it up throw it on her friend". Being in the shit like this makes you question what it is you're doing - reading, writing, making work, pursuing "Art" in this specific sort of sense, and why you're doing it, what you hope to gain from it. When I got back to my place, there was a part of me that thought "so this is it", realizing the near impossibility of getting money to make work, to be assimiliated into these massive systems that demand so much of you, and that's where being "Paul" would really pay out, as I could externalize these demands and ideally they wouldn't weigh so heavily on myself. But these possibilities seem so far away now.

I don't think this is bad thing. It's quite helpful on the end of prioritizing the end of day jobs and careers and how I structure my life around what it is that I'm passionate about but will probably never make me money. And there's a beauty in accepting that. Jackie Wang was talking about how poems are useless in that LA Times interview, and when I think about those little houses as poems, I also think about how terrible it would be to have to earn money by writing poems, to have to think about that in the process of making poetry, whether through words or walls or screens. I'm searching for an ending and maybe it's that all this shit was necessary. What I want is much clearer now, how the world operates is much clearer now. In a sense that's the main thing I wanted when I decided to approach S - a level of demystification in how things work. And he gave that to me, it wasn't on the surface of what he said, but what was immediately underneath. I realize there isn't much of a point in searching for an ending because there will be more words underneath this soon.

As I typed out "Dennis Cooper called Jon Jost the American Godard" I was reminded of a sketch of an essay that I never wrote, it remained a constellation of ideas and never took form. The same thing happened last night - a constellation of ideas under the title "Bitch I'm Back Out My Coma" about nations and the art they produce, about Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot, about The Book To Come and the need for addiction to a form, about Richter's Betty, Christian Petzold, and Klee's Angelus Novus, about OT7 Quanny's "Write A Book", "Stupid Bandz", and "Youngest Turnt". I think of essay writing like freestyling - maybe I've already said that somewhere in here - you have to stay in that mode throughout in order to maintain the work and maintain consistency in it. Too long and the threads get mixed up, the tone is in disarray, and it isn't cohesive. The problem I often run into is sketching out too wide a frame for the essay, and then being unable to maintain the freestyle session to get it all written down, or not even getting in the booth because of material circumstances (time, space, place, money). The following sketch is the latter.

It's about the idea of Remakes and Godard, of Remaking Godard, and of the role of "Paul" in Godard. In the first episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema, a subtitled voiceover reads: "They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso". In Godard's adaptation of King Lear, Woody Allen appeared, wearing a Picasso t-shirt. In the summer of 2022, Luh Tyler appeared, wearing a Picasso shirt. The idea of the essay shifted, away from remakes and Godard and Paul and into this obsession: "Why is Woody Allen in King Lear wearing a Picasso shirt" - which is a question all about remakes and Godard and Paul, of course.

Additional stars in this constellation: the Paul's of Godard's films - JPL in Masculin Feminin, Paul in Weekend, Paul Godard in Every Man For Himself — a film which Godard called his "Second First Film" which then splinters off another series of stars. The idea of a "First Film" as a "First Philosophy", and the idea of remaking this "First Film-osophy". The frame rate manipulation in Every Man For Himself as early VCR technology arrived, the need to re-theorize cinema due to the fundamental difference of video images. That Paul is also the name of Godard's father, of his bourgeois background, Freudian blah blah blahs. And the face of Jean-Pierre Leaud, a leap to Irma Vep and "images about images about images", a leap to Pasolini's Porcile and Pasolini's St. Paul screenplay. And the Paul of Contempt, the film an adaptation of an Italian novel, but "Riccardo" becomes "Paul" rather than "Ricard". The idea that Godard is to Cinema as Paul is to the Bible.

Further stars: Fassbinder's Love is Colder Than Death as a remake of Breathless, as his own remake of a "First Film-osophy", one that brought in Brecht and the theater and the essence of the German Nation. The idea of Fassbinder as a "German Godard", and this is where Cooper comes in, with the idea of Jost as the "American Godard", and inserting the opposition to Woody Allen, who saw himself in Godard, which confused Godard. And then a reading of JLG's 1994 Autoportrait as a nest of Woody Allen jokes, in which Godard flirts with his young hot assistant, squeezes her ass without permission, and then appears playing tennis in WA type drip towards the end, recalling Annie Hall.

Distant stars: Chris Marker's Statues Also Die, incorporated to ask the question of whether the images of film stars will die or if they'll be resurrected. In Spain, new stars emerge. Picasso and the African mask. In the shadow of the Alhambra, I realize that Chris Marker is a Geoffrey Crayon joke. And somewhere in this book on Marker I got lost in last summer "The Suffering Image" was that somewhere, I can't recall where, Marker said that there would be no second century for cinema. I deleted a tweet on a burner account that said "Thinking in centuries; or lies about time"; I've noticed it's a very French way of thinking about time. The tweet was accompanied by a collage of a Chinese painting of a woman over a still from Ouvrir that showed a car crash. "The Suffering Image" focuses on Marker's shows at Peter Blum Gallery, his return to the still image, if one thinks of La Jetee as such, but there's an inverse at play - not celluloid stretched out over time and reprinted onto a real, but video, frozen and manipulated, printed to be placed on a wall.

They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso. While Godard squeezes his assistant's ass he says "Europe is condemned to death". In the footnotes of The Suffering Image, one can read Marker say "life has become a fiction film" and "No, film won’t have a second century. That’s all". Paul appears throughout this text, as it investigates Marker's Messianicity, by way of Agamben's The Kingdom and The Glory, which also brings Pseudo-Dionysius into the fold, and the text is a mess, Anselm Kiefer appears for a paragraph, and as a reminder that I need to make it to London before Finnegans Wake is gone. I wonder where it'll go.

The Kingdom and The Glory factors into The Suffering Image, but not Agamben's The Time That Remains, which Simone White references in METRO BOOMIN WANT SOME MORE NIGGA, a section of an essay called "Dear Angel of Death". She talks about her students' understanding of XXXTentacion and Travis Scott, that they "understand something about the coming situation, this nothing, as Giorgio Agamben works the question of the now through his reading of Paul, that I am not equipped to understand". This reading of Paul contains a quote that was the central star of another constellation that never came to be, titled "RIP JEWELXXET":

"This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement]."

They'll forget all the details, but remember [Paul].

thought about blood while walking home today. not so much the liquid, but its relation to metaphor: the bleeding edge, the bleed of the page, how text bleeds, how text made with ink bleed through one page into the next if there's too much of it. but even more so about how life bleeds, how the things created in one container of memory move to change the self, and the inevitability of separate tracks of thought and method working their way to influence different things made in different places.

i was walking home from getting an ice cream sandwich at the deli w/ M, which we were doing after getting mexican food w/ J & E (E didn't get anything, i split tacos al pastor w/ J, M got a quesadilla, i don't think anyone got anything to drink, J also got a bag of chips, can't remember what kind), which we were doing after DJing. the way that we're DJ'ing now has gotten so deconstructed that it's not even about DJ'ing to play songs so much as DJ'ing to resequence and create new sounds. A loop of a bass drum turned into a wave of sound with how short the sequence, loop rolls, phasers, echos, crush, etc. maximizing the number of effects applied to a song. makes me think of Rave and Goetz's writing, and how far we are from the practice of DJing described in that book, in a World where you could only spin vinyls you had in your collection. i took two videos because we didn't record the set (here).

today was a strange day. i got a couple parking tickets back in march so i wanted to stack some supplementary bread to offset the costs and signed up for a medical survey thru craigslist. finally made it uptown for it today where psychiatry people asked me about my drug use and mental health history and had me play puzzle games for 4 hours. i got 60 in cash, a metrocard w/ 2 rides, a slice of pizza, a kind bar, and a few cups of water for doing this. i also had to pee in a cup. it was weird though, reminded me of how much i hate medical institutions, foucault prison shit blah blah blah, but really the voice and disposition of the PA asking me questions about my life. Facetimed T later and he agreed about how much that type of person sucks. i walked around the UES for a while after. though about, but didn't go to, the met because it was already 3 and i didn't want to pay 30 dollars to only go for 2 hours and i had plans to DJ at 6. went into a goodwill and put on a pinstriped armani blazer that was 30 dollars which i didn't get because i didn't want to spend money on clothes. but then in genius fashion, went into a french cafe and sat down and ordered a 24 dollar "salade" and a 7 dollar cappuccino. i scribbled in my notebook while sitting in their outdoor dining area, about watching a taxi that was broken down in the middle of 2nd ave and the driver standing behind it, waving cars past while yelling into his phone that he was between 88th street and 89th street. i thought about how it could've been a frank o'hara poems decades ago and how the world is different now and later i was walking on 86th street towards the train and saw the marquee of a theater below an apartment building and though about frankie cosmos. while still at the table i thought and wrote about the idea of "rendering", like rendering fat while cooking, but also rendering in blender, but also rendering reality.

in The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk wrote: "The foundation of the world is love. The foundation of love is the love we feel for God". He nestled it into the dialogue of a driver. in another world, the driver-turned-traffic-conductor on 2nd avenue was turkish, but he was clearly a Jew. one time i got an uber from my aunt's place in the san jose suburbs to the san jose BART station and the driver was from turkey. i talked to him about istanbul and about new york city. he said he used to live there too and asked me my favorite part. i said brighton beach and he agreed. "beautiful women," he said and i nodded, "only 50 dollars for the night of your life". i didn't expect this turn, but it makes sense that a turkish cabman was fucking slavic whores smuggled into the country. now there's a lot of russians in istanbul, they've left because of the war. my friend tells me it's fucking the rent up. i think of Eumaeus, and how I walked underneath Butt Bridge in Dublin, how the cabman's shelter is long gone, how it's a different bridge now than what used to be there. everything changes. there are so many Worlds

i got back to the city yesterday morning. caught up w/ S via facetime and then hung out w/ Z later. both were nice conversations, where we reflected on recent things. on my end, there was H&A's wedding this weekend. made plans to go back to the noguchi museum this week with Z. need to get something nice for H&A, as a belated wedding gift, but i'm glad it's late, I don't think I would've got the right thing, or been able to write the right letters to them before the wedding. it was a really beautiful thing to witness and even more special to be a part of. everything was always running late and that was fine, encouraged even, Time was moving different. on the flight there, I read Baudelaire's the salon of 1846. he talked about a lot of different shit; i was more interested in the form of the work than how he arrived at the ideas within, but he wrote it when he was 25, trying to outdo diderot (according to the preface). the french do this thing where they just make shit up and it becomes canon — the parts that stuck w/ me the most were about painters "unlearning" (the) past(s), portraiture as either history or fiction, landscapes of fantasy, and how for "men of letters" there is no such thing as sunday.

"men of letters" is such a funny term because we are all men of letters now. men of letters, men of images, men of sounds, men of emojis, men of whatever. I like the idea of Love as the foundation of world. I like that it's built into the foundation of this one.

Reflections on Bruno Caboclo:

When Bruno Caboclo was drafted an analyst described him as "two years away from being two years away". He was in the post-Giannis mold of prospects, an extremely raw gifted athlete who played in Brazilian leagues that could be described as amateur at best. For a while, I used this framework to think about myself, someone who came to art quite late compared to the others around me. Like when I was 23 and my work started getting motion, I thought about time in that way frequently. But now, two years into this process, I realzed that to think about that self who is supposedly only two years away and always be eluding me is an unhelpful framework, because artists don't develop like NBA players and the systems that artists operate within are not like the NBA.

But there are some similarities. When I look at the leaked photos of Ja Morant in the strip club, the floor completely covered in money, I think of the curse of privilege. Dame goes on podcasts and says the young guys don't love the game anymore, they just ended up there by virtue of God-given talent and have to find purpose in the hundreds of millions of dollars that will come their way. Ja pulled the blicky out on Live, then he did it again. When he's on the court, he flies like a ballerina. It's like breathing it's nothing it means nothing. All he's doing is Being. But what happens when you have to change your way of Being, when the conditions of the world necessitate change. I thought it was beautiful when Ty Lawson posted that Chinese women got cakes on the low and posted himself in the strip club and got kicked out of China. He got kicked off a team in Venezuela recently. Bro's art is pure dysfunction, he doesn't give a fuck, he stays being Him. Bruno never "made it" in the league. He's 27 now and playing in Germany. All that potential time never amounted to anything in terms of NBA results. I never watched him close enough to figure out "why". Giannis had that dog in him, and that dog never went away.

Getting Bread and Cooking are two different things.

And this shit is never a game, it's always practice. imma still get buckets tho

“He who writes, writes down himself first of all, for all to read.” - Cixous

I've been searching, faraway around the eyes, missing the feeling of being lost in a gazelle of windswept voices amongst all the broken benin bronzes. Mackey said "public" and "private" were disjunctive, now convergent masks for the featureless cave or the evaporative curve of an elapsed interiority, a nonexistent self, maybe that provides enough grounding, in Times Square there were so many different speakers playing Empire State of Mind and one speaker playing Rio Da Yung OG and so many people making images, I walked all the way down from 72nd street, where I sat in a diner drinking coffee eating marbled pound cake after a cigarette after watching Werckmeister Harmonies, another end of the world, staring at the rotting whale thinking that nature was bigger than man, that man was within nature, I was nodding off before, I like when that happens, then the sense of normal time is totally disrupted and the cinema flows into dream time, into everywhen I don't think I believe in an end of The World, but I believe in the ending of Worlds, i remember the ending of Worlds, like I remember forgetting your cosmologies and I remember forgetting that perfect sentence in order to escape its ending and the

it wasn't my party but we threw a party yeah we threw a party bitches came over yeah we threw a party echoes and echoes, i went, i saw people, we talked, we took pictures, we smoked, we pissed, then decided the night was over and rode him in a car talking and talking and talking, at that point with J, E and R were in the car drunksleep but noddingupon, the car was driving the wrong was but R fixed it, I had a nice talk with R on the roof before, about how people dress and their cosmetics, but also about life and past lives and future lives, just before we were at M's, i saw paintings and pig troughs, and me and M and J talked about art and publishing and films and systems and ate garlic bread and pasta and drank kombucha, J and I were talking about important things in the car, but they've faded, what's fresh is Food in SoHo in the 70s, now SoHo is different, everything is different and will never be the same

example: when jim jones jacked the beat to electric feel. now i listen to nr boor rap about mixing fetty with dog and hitting it with tranquil, N emailed me saying i was sensitive to a nihilistic plane of reality, but this is the first time in the opium wars that people made art about making drugs that eat flesh, the outro samples a newsclip about how narcan doesn't work, Flusser wrote in Our Inebriation that "man is not only a being that produces instruments, but also a being that produces instruments in order to escape from the tension produced by his instruments." and then he talks about art, "a medium to propitiate immediate experience"; "Art turns utterable the ineffable and audible the inaudible... The artist is the inebriate who emigrates from culture in order to reinvade it"; "To publish the private is the only type of engagement in the republic that effectively implies the transformation of the republic because it is the only one that informs it."; NR Boor says "we been out here doing all this wrong, I hope this money save us" and i think again everything is different and will never be the same but also everything is the same and will never be different, there are so many worlds always ending, Sauce Walka said "it's Armageddon on my block nigga!" over the pussy money weed beat, Cixous said "Death-in-life is more frightening than life... nothing is lost, because all is lost to begin with" and in Ouvrir, Marker went to Chateaubriand seeing the Battle of Waterloo, knowing he was watching the end of a world, then asking the viewer "what are you watching?" , and as i walked through time square and all the cameras and the noise and the heat i thought "what am i watching?" and on one hand Ulysses was so long ago, but on the other it just happened, time's string lost around the midnight suns

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, Time is a trap from which I am trying to escape, I is a self I'm trying to lose, the first time I spent months walking back and forth on the Sandymount Strand, trying to grasp for something because the ineluctable modalities were meaningless, after asking "whoever anywhere will read these written words?", he thinks "signs on a white field". returning again to language & writing as a means to transform reality, transforming reality as a means to change the world, create a world, end a world, and the idea that writing is a continous project, that one can become Almost Infinite, which is an Infinity separated from Infinity. in my mind I diagnosed the problem as people now trying to rewrite Joyce, but focusing on Stanislaus's diaries and the letters, but who are People, is this projection, what have I assembled here so far, and what will I continue to assemble, already the idea of sculpting these texts into a book is forming, and Cixous gets into the Joyce-Nora relationship as an experimentation space for literature, the fart letters are as much canon as Portrait and Wake, and are probably read more than anything else today, they circulate in far greater volume and frequency, and that speaks to both the work and the problem of work today, as volume and frequency is not a signal of value, but we are so inundated with everything, i inundate this page with words that could go on forever but will only go on for as long as i write it to.

"Joyce also tries to replace the imagery common to Western thought, with its implication of a beginning and an end, a here and a there, a past and a present, a self and an other, by a world without history, a continous world of osmosis. Space is then no longer defined by personal landmarks and one's surroundings are not a line separating the known and visible from a beyond which is different and strange. The outlines of reality become blurred, the horizon clouds over, and people and things can appear to us without being subjected to our minds' usual process of examination and recognition; races, knowledge, cultures, personal histories, childhood memories, desires, all mingle, with no concern for the normal boundaries of mine and thine, hic and ille, tunc and nunc. This is not chaos, but the polycentricity that has replcaed egocentricity or theocentricity."

I suppose what's obvious now is that this isn't the place for that nor can it be, as there's already the linearity inscibed into these numbers, the verticality of the scroll, there would need to be a whole different form, and Form was what first got me lost in Joyce, the imperceptible shifts between reality and hallucination to realize reality-as-hallucination, that there is no stable ground which Flusser fed into later, and I keep trying to understand what it is my task is, of course there is no Task, but there is a Holy Task, a Purpose, a Destiny, a Delusion, I used to think of this compulsion as a Delusion and he did too, and then it became Real, it enveloped me, but remembering the Delusion seems key, in order to reshape it, expand it, so that once it evelopes me again, I can inflate it, make it bigger, bigger, until it evelopes Time, History, -Self, all that I am trying to escape, awake, dissolve, Delusion as a Pharmako, the same words in different places, all these words to escape the near-Death and near-Suicide that has been so Real and Near lately, because of these public and private masks, my mind goes to those African masks, Black Skin, White Masks, Brown Skin, White Masks, how do you say dead sounds, dead words, dead signs, how do you make Dead Times alive again

in another sense, everything I do falls into this sort of diary type practice. not over-thinking, just Thinking

Casablanca has these little hallucinations, these little simulacra moments because they built Casablanca on movie sets in Los Angeles, the city of angels AKA the land of lived hallucinations, and then the people of Casablanca decided that they should imitate it. I had a steak sandwich at the Balthazar in Casablanca, thinking about the Balthazar in Manhattan, Durrell's Balthazar, and Au Hasard Balthazar before Balthazar Getty brings me back to Los Angeles via Lost Highway. There's also a Gatsby themed restaurant and a simulacra Rick's Cafe, both of which I only encountered through Google Maps. It isn't a city for tourists really, but tourists come because they know the name, the name is Famous, and then they arrive and the question emerges: what are they here to do?

You never really see Casablanca in Casablanca. You see the inside of a bar where you hear people talk and these conversations create images in the mind that are not on the screen and you build a feel for Casablanca, you Imagine it despite it never being Image. I tried to watch Season 2 of For the Love of Ray J, but I'm not going to make it to the end - the girls aren't as entertaining, the drama can't be manufactured, and the allure of place and cut sequences is winding down. The moon is always full in For the Love of Ray J, in both seasons, but once you're aware of this, it gets old, the temporal abberation gets old, because the absence of proper chronometry is a novelty..? No, that isn't it, because an abberation of what "should be" is not necessarily an absence, how would one create an absence of chronometry on a reality television show that moves chronologically — how would one create an absence?

The last three words of The Kingdom: I don't know. After I read them, Chief Keef played in my head. Done with the book, I read the entirety of that journal article about publishing from 1989 and it feels so "right now", which is why it circulated to me, but it's also because the word "clout" is used 3 times – the crux of the piece hits with the part about career ambition vs. literary ambition, but moreso with a quote from Cyril Connolly - "The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence" - with the following supposition that "the masterpiece, almost by definition, is written outside of this system". I Don't Know (snippet) dropped and it was only ever a snippet, but it dropped on youtube and was reuploaded onto soundcloud, and it had to be delivered like that because the system didn't allow for anything else

Every bar of the hook ends with "I Don't Know". Every bar of the verses is accompanied with these "baaang baaaang baaaang" sung auto-tuned adlibs. "In this critical model, as well as in many others such as the work of Gayatri Spivak for example, it is a complex attempt at self-location which is mobilized to counter the supposedly seamless and naturalized movement of knowledge across worlds of profound cultural difference, of the impossibility of 'knowing' or 'grasping'," says Rogoff, in the context of critiquing James Clifford's writing on travel and theory:

"If theories no longer totalize, they do travel. Indeed, in their diverse rootings and uprootings, theories are constantly translated, appropriated, contested, grafted. Theory travels; so do theorists. In the late twentieth century the producers and audiences of theory can no longer be situated in a more-or-Iess stable map of 'First World' and 'Third World' places"

I spent part of the day looking at apartments I can't afford. Carrere would get into all of his habits and routines in The Kingdom and I'd inevitably reflect on how I lacked that, and how when I've had it for a few months how fruitful those time periods are and I realize that I have trains and rooms to book because in less than 12 hours I have to leave this room.

I think about avoiding repeating myself. I think about the impending location of non-location. I think about emails and postcards, about to-do lists and deadlines, about the time, the night, the morning, and walking to the ocean and listening

Casa de Lava, house of lava, I remember watching it, but I didn't remember it, it was anew again. Mariana is so beautiful, she doesn't belong there, but there is no one one waiting for her in Lisbon. The black sand, the black soil, make you all the more aware of her white flesh. I remember loving the film - it's an easy film to love, every shot is perfect, every cut is perfect, the bits of music are perfect, you are transported somewhere utterly Other, and you see beauty in a world of pain, but it is also a world of love, but it is also a world of death, but it is also a world of life.

"We ought to die as children and be born old," says an old man. He plays a fiddle. His sons call music a cruel master. They say they're leaving for Lisbon to labor, to be laborers. At the end they leave. The old man says Mariana's heart is wounded, that it speaks with sadness. They speak Creole on the island. Lovers speak their own language, it's foreign to everyone else. I thought about when I had this. I thought about many other things during the moments of the film that dissipated into past instants forgotten. I remembered watching it, but I didn't remember it. How long had it been?

I write in my own life — sitting in the front row for New York premiere of Vitalina Varela, camera in hand, to tape the Q&A that followed. It was the applause and the standing ovation that bothered me deeply, the mediation of pain that we sat through, that nobody in the crowd could really understand, the same way I can't understand war and the shelling of Gaza, there is this pain that is deeply human, not just the experience of it, but the infliction of it. I thought about institutions and realized the festival wouldn't give me what I want, the people who'd see it wouldn't be the ones I want to see it. And now? It's been years. I can still make. I must make, and then it doesn't matter where it shows, what matters is that it's been made, that it can be seen.

It's all falling apart. It's heartbreaking. Soon the sun will rise and tonight I won't sleep. There is a day tomorrow, it's a day I will have. Although now I think twice before writing about the future, and assuming that I know it.

Writing as a means to transform reality — what is transforming to manipulation? And now, I'm ever aware of how we're always writing, of how that word has opened up in meaning, writing has blossomed here, it has nothing to do with the text.

Writing has blossomed here. This is a site of blossoming. Blossom: the flower of a seed plant; the state of bearing flowers; to bloom.

Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling

A sample. This cascade is confining, yet we work within confines. We grow within confines. We live within confines. This is a site of blossoming. A blossom of heartbeats.

Still, there remains this urge of ending. Leão, Black Orpheus, Back From The Dead. Suleiman, the name of a prophet, not an apostle. There is a post within apostle.

Muted heartbreak. I remember that I left the Casa de Lava notebook at Z's. I'll look through it again soon. Again I assume the future. Or I attempt to write the future. Sometimes it works, sometimes it blossoms. I remember, there is truth in it: I get to write what's next

I failed at doing nothing, it was good to fail, and now I'm enacting my failure. I lazily rewatched Irma Vep and there's a part where Maggie Cheung is talking to a journalist and the journalist is criticizing Rene Vidal's films as masturbatory, that they're only for him and not for the public, amd I thought about what I wanted and then I ended up reading PDFs and reading news about Africa, there was a coup yesterday in Niger, and this one's more important than all the other coups for the Western media because the U.S. has military interests in Niger because there's uranium in Niger, and then I read about Senegal, the opposition leader getting jailed, and the young men who are still attempting to make it to the Canary Islands and are still dying, and the thing about Africa is there are so many languages and so many ethnic groups that it makes India look like a homogenized country, I found a tweet or X-post or whatever they're supposed to be called now asking why there aren't women from Togo on Twitter / X and the replies were full of people talking about how expensive data is in Togo, and there's a Quanny line "You ain't got no fucking guap, nigga you a bozo" and the Bozo are a people in Mali, on the Niger river, and there are more than 30 national languages in Benin and when I was in Bilbao, I walked past a group of African men and it sounded like they were speaking Wolof and I wondered how they got there. I read an Art Journal pdf from before I was born, on the global and local in relation to Said's Orientalism and art practices from different parts of the world, where Enwezor asks "And where exactly is home for these people? And where home has become unimaginable except in old, tattered black-and-white photographs, what set of imperatives within the nascent narratives of crossing, settling, dwelling, and transterritorialization do such immigrants conjure up to locate themselves in the new land and to stitch the unruly patterns of home? How do they accommodate the locations of departure and arrival?" and later on the street I saw a fake Gucci backpack that read: "WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WHO ALL THIS FUTURE?" and in between those events I ate dinner and sat in the loudest silence and these Berber musicians were making their rounds through the streets it's like the showtime boys on the train but different but the same, I thought about the universality of this homelessness and I thought about what I want, realized what it is I want which is a sense of being at home, of course there's the Novalis "Philosophy is really homesickness — the desire to be everywhere at home" thing as I think about why art, why writing, why what I've done as the antidote towards this problem of homelessness, my parents responded to this homelessness by migrating and making a new home, in the process they ran away from so much and in the new home was a home where I could never be home and now I sit in Tangier, tired, exhausted, waiting for the next day of life, to search for home again

Went out last night and it was good, that simultaneity of a lot and nothing happened, where I looked at art, talked to people, drank beers, moved from one place to another, rode the tube. I left my place in the early evening, grabbed a cheeseburger that I ate on the bus and a Jamaican tonic wine that I drank on the tube, and then got to Hackney a little earlier than I preferred so I walked around for a little bit, smoked a cigarette, there was a beautiful double rainbow, and I tried to digest the locale. Went to a shop and grabbed a Sapporo tall boy, later it came up in conversation, the shape and the size of it, G, who I met while taking the lift up to the gallery, remarked that it was phallic right after I called the curves of it a little feminine. It was while we were looking at one of the works in the show, a piece of wood cut out from a shelf with stickers posted all over it. The stickers were from different hotels decades ago and the artist explained that her uncle collected them, not by traveling because he was a teenager in Communist Poland, but by writing to these hotels and asking for promotional materials, and this is what remains of that. It was fascinating detritus, the design on many of the stickers, like the Hilton Abu Dhabi and another hotel in Kuwait still linger in my mind, and what also comes to mind is Fassbinder capturing those hotels in Fox and His Friends. I guess there's a certain density to it that I like, but also its existence as a found object of sorts, but still a found object that had to be rendered by removal, by an act of cutting, and it was mounted on top of two door handles, one with keys in them. In the other room were 24 plates with paint to delineate hours, one for each time zone, rendering them into clocks without hands. The arrangement was haphazard, scattered across the floor, making it a bit of a landmine situation if you wanted to traverse the room, but they worked well with the tiles on the floor. In the kitchen was the last piece, another clock made of the tops of perfume bottles built onto the wall.

I was talking to A who runs the place and she mentioned something about an amount of selling out and I realized how that notion exists in the UK in comparison to the US, cultural differences blah blah blah, and people kept asking me how I knew about Galerina and sometimes I'd start by talking about Triest and overlap in spheres across cities, but often times people said they didn't know the spaces in other cities, so I switched to talking about my ongoing interest in the lineage and history of artist-run spaces, something that is true, it's how I've learned about ~Contemporary Art~ the most so to speak, you look at documentation, you see what shows galleries have shown, you try to grasp for an understanding through that. G made a joke about how I needed to write a blog about this, a guide to the apartment galleries scattered across the world, a traveller's guide so to speak, and it's funny because he just met me and had no idea about the writing practices I've had.

Later in the kitchen I met A2, who has the same name as A, and G, and their friends O and H, and it was great, we got to chatting and had a lot to chat about. I've really liked A2's work for a couple of years now, I found her stuff on soundcloud at first and then found her website through that and I really liked her sensibilities as they moved between sound and video and drawing and painting, how she moved between these forms in a very seamless way in terms of how the works functioned - oblique and beautiful. On the other end, I didn't realize how much she liked my work, she said that she and G really loved my soundcloud stuff and asked when I was releasing more stuff, and I talked to G about how much I liked some of the tracks he's put up on soundcloud too. It was also interesting because she talked about how there was a level of elusivity to me, something that I felt was gone because I've met so many of the people that were just formerly mediated through the virtual, but I suppose there's so many people I haven't met who engage with the work and I do maintain this reticence / distance in terms of rarely reaching out. When I posted a story of the Beyonce painting A2 liked it and I decided I should hit her up because I figured she'd be at the Galerina show either way, but before that we hadn't ever really talked, just comments, and I suppose that's part of the elusiveness. But I think this elusiveness ends in person because I'm quite forthcoming, too honest, and at the end of it I don't think it matters too much, there's a bit in the Guyton talk where he's asked about his elusivity and he doesn't feel elusive, he just doesn't do much press as some of his peers.

Moments of note from the hours gone by: A2 asks me about The Manhattan Art Review and I tell her about him assaulting J at an opening and she says she likes J's work. I tell her about wanting to waterboard him and she thinks it'd be a funny show. We're talking about college but I'm saying "Uni" and A2 asks me if they say that in the states and I say no I'm just assimilating and code switching. I take a guest shot during a game of pool and have a decent strike on the cue ball but can't knock anything in. There were no numbers on the pool balls, just 2 sets of colors, except for the 8 ball. A girl asked me if I'd read anything recently that fucked me up and I mentioned the Manto but didn't get into it - she mentioned a book about Iraq but didn't get into it. I think about how much talking happened, where do the words go once they dissipate, some into memory yes, but only the smallest amount when there's so many things being said. We talked about gossip and there was gossip, I talked about how I liked gossip and how it functioned, A2 brought it up after I talked about the whole Twombly Donnelly thing and the work I want to make but can't, but also how if I were to show that work I'd want to elide presenting that whole context, she was saying it'd still exist because I'd have talked about it enough and people would then talk about it, it's similar to how I was walked through the Arcadia Missa show with an explanation even if the press release didn't have that many words. I talked with A about the White ppl think I'm radical show and she said it was a Moment when it happened. I've been thinking about this Ot7 Quanny line constantly for the past two days:

"I got paid for a show, then bought some work yea cuz I'm Trapped Out"

I made a video from a moment last night, where A2 was cutting cake on the tracks of the tube stop, layering in footage of a walk through the medina, a television playing a soap in a coffee shop, and the ocean meeting cliffs in Rabat. I kept parts of the audio as well, mixing it with the second "Max B type beat" I made, and I titled the video "VVS Lemonade (coming soon)", the title of the Classic Selena project I want to drop soon, but I also liked how the paranthetical brackets made "coming soon" into a sort of separated message. I went through A2's soundcloud likes yesterday and found this kp0p track that really blew my mind hearing it here. The VVS Lemonade title comes from a song he did with stunny that was deleted off kp0p's soundcloud in 2020 when they beefed out about something. I talked about that bay area scene, I talked about A3 and our friendship, I feel like I did so much talking. It'll even out, I'll be speaking much less over the coming weeks. I texted the kp0p track to C and called him one of the greatest working artists in America. the song's called "i aint never coming back home" - this universal homelessness, brought me back to living on San Pablo ave thinking about San Pablo's Finest, and I wonder where kp0p is now. if he'll ever go back to Richmond. I met this girl from Albany in Romania and she was saying no one could afford to stay there anymore, her parents divorced and her mom lived in Bulgaria, she didn't know what she was doing and would drink vodka everyday to pass the time. i loop 'i aint never coming back home' and pack up for another flight

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